Older blog entries for plundis (starting at number 11)

Easter is always nice. This one was my first without my childhood family. Felt kind of strange, but pretty okay. Anyway, we gathered some friends and made some good food and all that, and after that we played some nice old 8-bit Nintendo games for some hours. Other than that, I was at some kind of party with lots of strange people in Katrineholm.

Now, the coding part. We've fixed lots of things in the keyboard server. 0.0.1 will probably be out rather soon. It will have UTF-8 support (for non-ASCII characters) and use the new mailbox system in storm and almost everything else. Oh yes, we've fixed real PS/2 support too. This will be really neat. We're also thinking of releasing storm 0.4.2 this weekend, since we fixed some cruicial bugs this weekend.

Ouch. I had to spend the night at work due to a deadline. Not too nice, although it means I can go pretty early today (like, in half an hour). Nice end of this week..

This weekend, we specified library_ipc and I started implementing it. It's mostly finished now. Hal and DoA started fixing up some caveats in the memory allocation system. They are on their easter vacation now, so I'd guess they'll pretty much finish the missing parts of the memory allocation system. We could really use memory deallocation and memory allocation for processes, I mean.. :)

My boxed version of the Lord of the Rings books arrived friday. Now, all I need is time to read them...

What a hectic week! Haven't seen anything like this for long. Anyway, I haven't really had the time to code much on chaos this week. :/ I really hate not having the time to do the things I like. Now for some chaos news:

Hal has been starting the rewrite of the page allocation system to HiFi Eslöf 2.0, which will replace the current HiFi Eslöf system (Don't ask about the names, it's a long story). I'm currently planning on how the IPC library should work. Hope to have a working implementation up tonight..

The web spider I've been writing some postings about is getting pretty much finished. I'm running it as we speak on the first 100 sites which was part of the deal. A cool thing is that I've spoken to my boss about GPL:ing it, and he was pretty enthusiastic, so you might se Byggdok Aranha announced on Freshmeat soon. :)

A nasty bug in the kernel made it quite nonfunctional, but we've put a patch on the web. Now for some other cool news. John Hennessy, a fellow chaos hacker, has been hacking around to make it possible to write C++ programs for chaos. It will not really be functional before storm 0.5.0, but I thinks pretty neat anyway.

We've finally put the time to make a new kernel release. You'll find it here. Most features are working, or at least so it seems. Pretty neat.

The web is up, but now we've got DNS trouble instead. :/ I hope to resolve this soon. Anyway, I think we might move our domain away from Network Solutions to another provider to avoid their lousy administration system. Long live web based administration!

And as usual, a side note. We've added a parameter to memory_global_allocate, which controls the alignment of the allocated block. This is neccessary for the TSS:s, since they must not cross page boundaries. As usual, we've run into some new trouble to tamper. Local variables doesn't seem to work in our servers. This is a problem we've had before, and we just don't seem to be able to solve it. When we do a system call, something seems to screw the stack. I don't really know why. Anyhow, I think we'll solve this in the weekened if we just concentrate on it.

As far as work is concerned, my all-amazing web spider is getting almost complete. Maybe it should be released under the GPL? On the other hand, such a piece of program is a little dangerous (it collects E-mail addresses, for example. We use it for solemnly legitimate purposes, but it could be used to send UCE and other junk mail). I'll have to think about it for a while.

Gha. Our main server (abraham.chaosdev.org) just had a hard drive failure. Luckily, the web pages are backed up, but that's merely a fraction of everything..

Oh, well. Hopefully it'll be up later today or tomorrow. Now for some better news. The bugs in the AVL code has been fixed, so now we could start a whopping 6235 threads on the previously amentioned machine. We're currently fixing up the IPC code so that we can start getting into some serious stuff.

This weekend, we got an unexpected visit from my cousin (who had been hitchhiking through half the country. Wonder if he has been reading the Guide too much lately). My parents and siblings also came on a visit on sunday.

But that's not why I'm writing. We finished thread_create () this weekend. Something in the AVL code seems slightly broken (we fail to allocate more memory after just above 1300 threads, which is far below what we should be able to achieve on a machine with 128 megs of RAM). After some more checking, the AVL tree gets broken after a while. Have to debug this some more. Anyhow, the code seems pretty fast so now we might finally be able to get things up for chaos 0.0.1. See you on the other side. :-)